As some of you know, I've been studying the emerging market for "code schools", not an entirely new phenomenon, but spiraling through a next iteration around now. Why am I interested? Because per my LinkedIn profile, I've been working in this arena for a long time, back to the 1980s when I was a trainer in Lotus 1-2-3, dBase and WordPerfect. "I go way back" as they say, in the Way Back Machine (see archive.org). Here's one of my recent BI-like findings, using my own neural net (the one between my ears): code schools are in need of on-the-shelf prototypes that students might hack on, both alone and together, and a logical application every code school needs is (drum role): an on-line gift shop (with optional brick 'n mortar add-on with point of sale devices). Why? Well lets take the case of many colleges and universities that teach computer science as an academic subject. If one drills down, with the question, "do they eat their own dog food?" the answer is often "no, they use Banner" or some other engine to manage registration, enrollment, HR stuff. They don't roll their own and why should they? Their business is teaching the theory, not designing college-management applications. Admin is free to not bother faculty and outsource instead; buy off the shelf stuff (COTS) if you can find it. [1] With a code school though, it's different, at least when it comes to those advertising "full stack engineer" as what they're hatching (eager eggheads lining up). Any code school worth its salt should be turning out the very folks who write those on-line gift shop applications, in Django, Rails or whatever. The Shopping Cart. Other paradigms. "How do we know they're learning those skills and actually writing such applications?" the hopeful employer wants to know. We can see their checked in code in Github that's how. Front End, Back End, whatever, they've hacked on a gift shop prototype, maybe not the one running at the moment, but that's neither here nor there (the Ux keeps changing out, as the code school rotates its look and feel). Some capstone project: a gift shop in Haskell, fully operational. Wow. Another capstone: a MEAN stack using TypeScript with Angular2, classic implementation. Again wow. "This school has the cheese! We want our people from there!" Plus every school needs a gift shop, of course, for alumni and enrollees, partners and siblings, who want to partake of the swag. This won't all happen overnight. Some code schools have gift shops already. I'm anticipating a trend here, so we can all look back and see if my crystal ball was cloudy or clear. Kirby [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_off-the-shelf